Adam Clulow, Author at Not Even Past

The State of the City: Book Review Series

In recent years, there has been a surge of new research on the role, place and functioning of cities. This series, which is a collaboration between Urbānitūs and Not Even Past, aims to share insights from the latest research as well as classic books that explore the varied lives of cities and the connection between urban development and globalization.

Thomas Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis

Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City

Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision

Thomas Bender, The Unfinished City

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis

George Chauncey, Gay New York

Mike Davis, City of Quartz

Robyn Metcalfe, Meat, Commerce, and the City

Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America

DH in an Online World: Building a Digital Humanities Portfolio for the Classroom

by Adam Clulow

Digital Humanities is a capacious term that means different things to different people. For me, Digital Humanities is at its best when it emphasizes “making, connecting, interpreting, and collaborating”.[1] When I did my doctorate, Digital Humanities was just emerging as a set of skills and I paid very little attention to it. I wrote my first book much as a scholar might have done at any point in the past century by diving deep into archives and thinking of a largely academic audience. The key shift came for me when I became stuck as I attempted to write my second book.

My research project at this time focused on the Amboyna (Amboina) conspiracy case, a controversial legal trial that took place on a remote island in Indonesia but involved a global list of characters including Japanese mercenaries, English officials, Dutch merchants, slaves from South Asia and local polities. Because it was so controversial, the case generated thousands of pages of frequently contradictory court records, depositions and other materials. Putting together the different versions of the case creates a dizzying Rashomon- like kaleidoscope of possible interpretations, making reaching any sort of conclusion very difficult.

In 2014, after almost a decade of research on the case, I decided that I had to try something different. My breakthrough came when I noticed that all my students in Australia were talking about a different trial that had taken place some year earlier. What I was witnessing was the remarkable worldwide response to the groundbreaking first season of the podcast Serial, which focused on a 1999 murder case in Baltimore. I watched in wonder as students, who were previously reluctant to engage with legal materials, dissected new pieces of evidence, often devoting hour after hour to the details of a decades-old case. The average Serial episode was downloaded over 3 million times and it generated a tremendous response as the public logged vast numbers of hours working through the key pieces of evidence.

Listening to Serial, I began to wonder if I couldn’t do something similar (on a far smaller scale) for my classroom, that is make a large quantity of information related to the trial I was working on freely available and see if students would respond in the same way by digging into these sources and putting forward their own conclusions. Working with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, I built an interactive website, The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial, designed to do just that. At the heart of the site is an interactive trial engine which places students at the center of the case. To make a complex trial more accessible, we boiled the controversy down to six key questions that have to be answered one way or the other in order to come to a verdict. For each question, the site presents the arguments mobilized by both sides, the prosecution and defense, in conjunction with the most important pieces of evidence, related documents and legal commentary from a distinguished trial attorney. In addition, we created a large repository of additional material and documents, which students can work through at their own pace to support their conclusions.

After hundreds of hours of consultation, design, and construction, the website went live in 2016. It was trialed first with multiple classes at Monash University in Australia, then at Brandeis University and finally at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Students worked through the materials, completed the trial engine, and then arrived at class ready to debate and defend their conclusions. When these tests were complete, we made the website publicly available, and since then thousands of visitors from across the world have worked through it, with their verdicts all recorded in our database.

The site had an immediate impact on students, pulling them deep into complicated material and stimulating impassioned and productive debate in big lecture courses and seminars. Although some students tossed off a verdict after racing through the materials, many others confided to me that they had become engrossed by the details of the trial, trawling through the sources and coming back again and again to key points.

As Digital Humanities tools go the Amboyna website is not especially sophisticated or technologically demanding, but it changed my approach to both the case and the classroom more generally. First, having dozens of pairs of new eyes examining familiar material proved a revelation for me. By homing in on points that I had dismissed too quickly and forcing me to defend lazy assumptions in class, these students helped me think through the mass of evidence. Second, it changed the way I taught. Trying and retrying the case in seminar after seminar was one of the most satisfying experiences of my teaching career and it made me want to incorporate such exercises into all my classrooms. Over the long term, the experience convinced me that I wanted to focus my energies and time on DH resources built for the classroom that could be used to enrich my teaching and then pushed out to other teachers looking for reliable, vetted digital content.

This ethos motivated a second DH project, Virtual Angkor, which was built from the ground up for the classroom. Constructed by a team of Virtual History Specialists, Archaeologists and Historians at Monash University in Melbourne, Flinders University in Adelaide and the University of Texas at Austin across a period of more than ten years, the Virtual Angkor project aims to recreate the sprawling Cambodian metropolis of Angkor at the height of the Khmer Empire’s power and influence around 1300. Although it has been used for research, Virtual Angkor was constructed specifically for the classroom and can be used at both secondary and tertiary level. It deploys advanced Virtual Reality technology, 3D Modeling and Animation to bring a premodern city to life, to place students on its streets and allow them to interact with a historical environment.

Most Asian history survey courses make reference to Angkor but the standard black and white illustrations featured in textbooks make it difficult for students to gain a sense of the scale and grandeur of the city. The Virtual Angkor project allows educators to place students inside the Angkor Wat complex, to view the famous bas-reliefs first hand without leaving their seats, to sail down one of the hundreds of canals crisscrossing the city, to inspect a marketplace selling goods from across Southeast Asia and to watch as thousands of animated people and processions enter, exit, and circulate around the complex. The result is to draw students into a virtual world and then to use this experience as a jumping off point to engage with primary sources.

Both my Amboyna Conspiracy Trial project and Virtual Angkor were driven by faculty, that is by professors like me with an interest in DH and some funding. In 2020, I wanted to try something different: to see if a group of students could develop their own DH resources in the form of historically-based, educationally focused video games. The experiment was driven, first, by an awareness of the dramatic growth of the video games industry in recent years and, second, by a sense that History departments needed to engage more closely with what has become a key conduit for students in our classes.

At current estimates, video games are a $120 billion industry and one that is growing rapidly every year. For university students in particular, video games are pervasive. According to surveys, more than 70% of college students play video games, even more watch gaming content streamed on a range of services and the overwhelming majority report some exposure to video games across multiple platforms. At the same time, video games have become an increasingly important gateway for majors. Many students who enter our classrooms come to History via historically-based games which proliferate across multiple platforms.

Historians can engage with video games in two basic ways. First, we can deploy them much as a film or a novel to interrogate popular understandings of particular topics, moments or figures. Second, we can use them as a learning tool by asking students to design their own games. This was our approach. After an open call for applications followed by interviews, we recruited four students, Ashley Gelato, Michael Rader, Izellah Wang and Alex Aragon, for a semester long Digital Humanities internship focused on game design, story-telling, programming, and history.

The game to be developed was constrained by a set of guidelines. First, it had to be built around a specific historical episode, the Akō incident (also known as the story of the 47 ronin). Second, the game had to have clear educational payoff that could provide a window into the difficult life of a low-ranking samurai family in the eighteenth century. Third, the game had to be developed on zero budget, using only free, publicly available platforms and software without purchasing game assets.

The result of the experiment was impressive: a deep learning experience for the students, who combined extensive research, multiple disciplines and different technologies, to produce a fully functional game, Ako: A Tale of Loyalty, that was hooked to contemporary scholarship. By the end of the semester in May 2020, the game was distributed to beta-testers who provided feedback. In September 2020, it was used for the first time in a university setting as an educational resource and it will soon be released on commercial platforms where it will be available for download at no charge.

I have other DH projects but the ones described above taught me four key lessons. First, decide what you want to achieve with your DH profile. Having taught at high school and a range of tertiary institutions, I decided I wanted to reach as many teachers and students as possible. For this reason, I built DH resources specifically for the classroom as there is a huge appetite for vetted, scholarly content that is also accessible. Second, the technological hurdle can be as high or as low as you want. Although I have grown accustomed to using bulky Virtual Reality equipment in class, some of my best teaching experiences have been using the Amboyna conspiracy trial website even though this is nothing more sophisticated than a few web pages, some videos and a basic voting system. Third, collaborate always and often. In History, the emphasis is so often on solo-authored publications and this is how we are trained. But DH is done best when you collaborate as widely as possible. This means making connections, working across disciplines, and constantly communicating. For Virtual Angkor, working with Tom Chandler, who teaches in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash has been illuminating, challenging and always exciting. And fourth, don’t be afraid to share your research. For the Amboyna Conspiracy trial website, I was counseled not to put all my material online as it might be used by other scholars or would diffuse the argument of my eventual book. In fact, sharing these resources was the best thing I could possible have done as it sharpened my argument while creating a community of scholars who pushed me to rethink my assumptions. Although I love working by myself in archives with only the sources and my computer, DH can be an antidote to the sometimes isolating nature of our profession. It pushes us to collaborate, to share and to think about how our research can be useful for others. This is why I find Digital Humanities so exciting and why I think it rewards any time you invest in it.

Right now we are, I believe, in a moment of transition when not only faculty but also undergraduate students can produce world-class DH resources like the Ako game that can be developed across a single semester and then shared around the world for use in a range of classrooms. This makes Digital Humanities skills more important that ever before. All of this brings me to one last lesson that has animated the development of my DH portfolio: Just start. You never have all the skills, all the training and all the resources but you can produce something valuable that will be of use. Whereas academic publishing is measured in months or usually years, DH allows radically different timelines. Starting is often the hardest part of DH projects but in a very short space of time your work can reach a wide audience.

[1] Digital_Humanities. Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp. MIT Press. December 2012.

IHS Climate in Context Roundtable Book Review: Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979) by Donald Worster

Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, by Donald Worster (1979) Header Image

By Atar David and Rodrigo Salido Moulinié

We are excited to present this roundtable review on the 42nd anniversary of Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl, a classic work in environmental history.

***

BOOM, BUST, DUST

Atar David

Many Americans experienced the 1930s as a nightmare. In the urban centers, the stock market crash of 1929 and the years of economic depression that followed it sent millions of blue-collar workers to stand for hours in breadlines. In the countryside, a series of dust storms, also known as the Dust Bowl, covered vast areas of the Great Plains with dense clouds of sand, destroying fields and farms, forcing families to migrate in large waves. Was it a coincidence? For Donald Worster, the answer is a clear no, and the lessons he draws from that period resonates to today.

In Dust Bowl (1979) Worster argues that both the economic hardship and the environmental catastrophe stemmed from a hyper-capitalist system that, while striving to maximize profits, caused an imbalance in both the markets and nature. Drawing on governmental papers, personal testimonies, and literary sources, Worster demonstrates how farmers and government officials alike promoted a shared vision of agricultural conquest of the plains during the early twentieth century. Within this vision, the land was a source of capital gains, and farmers had both the right and the obligation to extract maximum profits, regardless of the impact on nature. The farmers of Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, and New Mexico fulfilled this capitalist vision. Indeed, according to Worster, the Dust Bowl “came about because the culture was operating in precisely the way it was supposed to” (p.4). Contrary to prior assertions that the Dust Bowl was a natural disaster, Worster reveals that it was people who woke the monster that slept under the once-grassy lands of the plains.

*Arthur Rothstein,* *Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm. Cimarron County, Oklahoma. Source: Library of Congress*

The book is divided into five chapters. Each examines the Dust Bowl from a different perspective. These chapters fall into three sections, each presenting a unique methodological and conceptual contribution. The first two chapters, A Darkling Plain and Prelude to Dust contextualize the dust bowl within the cultural and economic history of the US. Worster demonstrates how the ethos of the agricultural conquest of the plains evolved, was implemented, and eventually collapsed (or, rather, was blown away in the wind). By synthesizing official reports with cultural artifacts, Worster opens new methodological ways of understanding “nature” as a part of a complex cultural and social ecosystem. Later, in chapters three and four, Worster presents the story of the Dust Bowl through the personal testimonies of residents from Oklahoma and Kansas. These chapters reveal not only Worster as a storyteller, but also as a skeptical scholar who questions the narrative of progress many local residents told themselves while dusty particles filled the sky. Lastly, Worster’s fifth chapter connects the Dust Bowl to the historiography of the New Deal. While state officials, ecologists, and agronomists almost immediately recognized the human role in creating the environmental disaster, all three groups failed to implement reforms to restore prosperity to the region. Many of those responsible for utilizing solutions were still bound to the same capitalist and romantic perception of the frontier as a land to be conquered, which Worster argues caused the problem to begin with.

*Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s* by Donald Worster

Worster’s analysis raises questions that go beyond the realm of environmental history and encourages readers to think about capitalism, culture, and social structures as well. One such contribution is the idea of “the industrialization of the grassland,” the process by which humans commodified and subordinated nature. This industrialization was first and foremost an intellectual project, in which ideas of progress and prosperity overshadowed notions of conservation and natural equilibrium. Yet, the process was not complete without the introduction of machines and new cultivation techniques that materialized this vision, turning the field into a factory.

For a book published over forty years ago, Dust Bowl seems more relevant today than ever. Readers interested in environmental change will find in it both rich descriptions and methodological inspiration. Other readers will find it a painful reminder to some of our contemporary crises. As I am writing this review, dusty particles from wildfires cover the sky of much of the U.S. west in a clear emblem for the effects of the destructive power of human negligence toward nature. Sadly, Worster’s final words, that “man, therefore, needs another kind of farming by which he can satisfy his needs without making a wasteland” (p.243), still echo today.

Blaming Culture

Rodrigo Salido Moulinié

In his classic book Dust Bowl, Donald Worster traces the causes, consequences, and meanings of a perfect storm that took place in the Great Plains of the 1930s. Drought, global economic collapse, and a deep desire to exploit the land for profit materialized in a dark wall of dust. After years of plowing the land, inescapable dust storms covered the region destroying its harvests and displacing its people. Worster argues that the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression were two sides of the same coin: the American capitalist ethos. The expansionary energy of the Roaring Twenties not only brought machines and resources to the Plains, it brought ideas, values, and specific conceptions of economic order and ecology. In this order, nature served as capital and humans had the duty to exploit it for self-advancement. As Worster puts it: no word that so fully sums up those elements as “capitalism.”

Worster draws from a wide range of sources, from census data and technical reports to personal interviews, photographs, and paintings. These texts, sounds, and images appeared as part of a larger tradition of documenting the U.S. South and West in the thirties and forties. The technical developments that allowed photographic cameras to become portable, practical devices to capture the world emerged at a time of enormous cultural and political shifts. The suffering and urgency of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression opened new avenues for representation and new possibilities of discourse in the arts and sciences. The economic hardships of the South were not new, of course, but the thirties offered novel ways to show and talk about them.

*Arthur Rothstein, Dust Storm, Oklahoma. Source: Library of Congress*

The Dust Bowl happened during the rise of the documentary tradition in the United States that entailed the visual discovery of poor families, fragile houses, and empty landscapes: the Other America. This appeal of the Southern and Western regions of the United States as places to do documentary work linked several fieldwork traditions: travel writing, ethnography in anthropology and sociology, literature, public policy design, and journalism. Photographers of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) such as Walker Evans, Jack Delano, Arthur Rothstein, and Dorothea Lange, writers like James Agee and Erskine Caldwell, and social scientists like Paul Taylor and Howard Odum, all went out to capture this other America, to put it in images and words.

The assemblage of the Other America entailed a series of operations that resembled those of writers, sociologists, and anthropologists going into “the field” or bureaucrats charting new territories. As sites filled with otherness, these regions were then imagined as a geographically close, yet culturally distant place. As regions embedded in backward ways of life and economic hardship, they were also constructed as a temporally distant site: writers and photographers became, like ethnographers, time-travelers.

Worster uses a vast array of sources to show how stories, ideas, and practices make sense—and have concrete, devastating consequences—in the larger webs of meaning of 1930s America. He makes a powerful argument against the inevitability of the Dust Bowl and ecological determinism. Environmental factors alone cannot fully explain the black blizzards: human practices and ideas played the main role by producing an order where profit drives behavior, instead of long-term sustainability.

Although not explicitly at the core of Worster’s book lies a method that ethnographers, photographers, and other fieldworkers employ: empathy. As a way of seeing, as a mode of writing, or as a criterion to navigate sources, wearing the shoes of others shapes Worster’s argument. “The American plainsmen,” he writes, “were as intelligent as the farmers of any part of the world.” Another reason explains why they overrun their environment: “It is the hand of culture that selects out innate human qualities and thereby gives variety to history. It was culture in the main that created the Dust Bowl.”

*A black blizzard over Prowers County, Colorado, 1937. Source: Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma*

Having worn those shoes once in his youth, Worster knows his fellow plainspeople will probably dislike his book. It was their ways, and not an ecological anomaly or divine revenge, that caused so much suffering and devastation. Yet Dust Bowl shifts the blame from the actors to a higher concept. “Culture,” it appears, in this case the practices and beliefs associated with a capitalist ethos, explains the black blizzards rather than people. The invisible hand of culture moved them to change the environment and turned it to dust. Farmers who reluctantly accepted the support they desperately needed, but who would go back to overrunning the land as soon as hard times pass, illustrate the underlying problem Worster addresses. In his view, the ethos of American capitalism limits human agency to the point where it dilutes some of their responsibility—to change the landscape and secure its future, the system needs change.

Dust Bowl tells a story of suffering, ecological neglect, misery, and unintended consequences. It also evokes stories it is unable to tell, forgotten tales that got lost amid the dust—a beautiful book. A true classic, the question it poses and the answers it offers retain their relevance: the links between climate change and capitalism, the use of multi-media sources, and what is at stake when using the body and memories to write such an outstanding work. Yet its main contribution today lies beyond tone, scope, and method: it reminds readers of the importance of documenting the world today, the value and difficulty of helping others, and the urgency of posing difficult questions about our ways of life.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

IHS Book Talk: Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789

The History Faculty New Book Series presents:
Sex in an Old Regime City Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789

A conversation with

JULIE HARDWICK
John E. Green Regents Professor of History, and UT Distinguished Teaching Professor
University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/jholwell

and

KARIN WULF
Professor of History, College of William & Mary, and
Director, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
https://www.wm.edu/as/history/faculty/wulf_k.php

Our ideas about the long histories of young couples’ relationships and women’s efforts to manage their reproductive health are often premised on the notion of a powerful sexual double standard.

In Sex in an Old Regime City (Oxford University Press, 2020), Julie Hardwick offers a major reframing of the history of young people’s intimacy. Based on legal records from the city of Lyon, Hardwick uncovers the relationships of young workers before marriage and after pregnancy occurred, even if marriage did not follow, and finds that communities treated these occurrences without stigmatizing or moralizing. She finds a hidden world of strategies young couples enacted when they faced an untimely pregnancy. If they could not or would not marry, they sometimes tried to terminate pregnancies, to make the newborn go away by a variety of measures, or to charge the infant to local welfare institutions. Far from being isolated, couples drew on the resources of local communities and networks. Clerics, midwives, wet nurses, landladies, lawyers, parents, and male partners in and outside the city offered pragmatic, sympathetic ways to help young, unmarried pregnant women deal with their situations and hold young men responsible for the reproductive consequences of their sexual activity. This was not merely emotional work; those involved were financially compensated. These support systems ensured that the women could resume their jobs and usually marry later, without long-term costs. In doing so, communities managed and minimized the disruptions and consequences even of cases of abandonment and unprosecuted infanticide.

This richly textured study re-thinks the ways in which fundamental issues of intimacy and gendered power were entwined with families, communities, and religious and secular institutions at all levels from households to neighborhoods to the state.

“A superb reconstruction of a lost world of intimacy and power. Julie Hardwick’s absorbing, enriching work reveals the common language of love; the balance of force and caresses in courtship; the pragmatic concerns of marriage; and the solutions to unplanned pregnancies, showing the capacity of young women and men to shape their own circumstances and tell their stories.”
— Laura Gowing, King’s College London
“Sex in an Old Regime City explores a topic that seems well beyond the reach of historians: sexual intimacy between urban adolescents at a quarter of a millennium remove. Julie Hardwick’s remarkable study is based on the ‘archive of reproduction’ accumulated around the biological and emotional consequences of that intimacy — ranging from pregnancy declarations, paternity suits, notarial documents, doctors’ prescriptions, religious injunctions, infant autopsies and hospital archives through to billet-doux and foundlings’ tokens. Hardwick’s humane and sympathetic eye reveals a richly delineated world that has poignant continuities as well as contrasts with our own.”
— Colin Jones, Queen Mary University of London
“A boldly written and brilliantly researched tour-de-force. Drawing upon meticulous archival work, Julie Hardwick explodes our understanding of what we thought we knew about pregnancy declarations, licit intimacy, and patriarchal discipline and reveals a far more complex system of communal complicity. Sex in an Old Regime City is a must-read for all scholars of the early modern world, especially those interested in legal, social, and gender history.”
— Meghan Roberts, Bowdoin College
“This well-written and impressively researched book sheds important new light on sexual intimacy, reproduction, and marriage among young adults in eighteenth-century France. Stories of the lives and loves of ordinary working people bring their previously inaccessible intimate world to life.”
— Clare Crowston, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Dr. Hardwick works at the intersections of legal, economic, social and family/gender history in early modern France. She grew up in the U.K, and earned her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to Sex in an Old Regime City she is the author of The Practice of Patriarchy: gender and the politics of household authority in early modern France (Penn State University Press, 1998) and Family Business: litigation and the political economy of daily life in early modern France (Oxford University Press, 2009). She has many essays in edited collections, and her articles have appeared in The American Historical Review, The Journal of Social History, The Journal of Modern History, The William & Mary Quarterly, The Journal of Women’s History, European History Review, History Compass, and French Historical Studies. She has held two N.E.H year long research fellowships and was the distinguished invited research scholar at the Gender and Work Project at the University of Uppsala in 2014. She is currently an IHS Fellow, and was the founding director of the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her next book project is in progress: Hanging Bankrupts: Credit, Crime and the Transition to Capitalism. Follow her work on Twitter @DrJulieHardwick.

On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden by Elizabeth Hennessy (2019)

On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden. By Elizabeth Hennessy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. xx + 310. 20 illustrations, notes, 4 maps, bibliography, and index. $30.00.

Located about 400 miles off the coast of Ecuador, the Galápagos Islands hold profound cultural importance as symbols of conservation, wild nature, and biodiversity. Charles Darwin visited the islands in 1835 and his encounters with the fauna of the Galápagos went on to shape his 1859 work On the Origin of Species. In contemporary times, statues of Charles Darwin await tourists in almost all of the small settlements on the islands. Scientists with UNESCO, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and the Charles Darwin Research Station on the archipelago, architects of the current conservation project, present conservation as a continuation of Darwin’s legacy. However, in many ways, by seeking to reconstruct a pure “state of nature,” the conservation efforts that started to take shape in the 1930s have led to a contradictory project of stripping the islands of past traces of humanity through far-reaching and sometimes violent intervention.

In On the Backs of Tortoises, Elizabeth Hennessy frames the lumbering, armored reptilians of the Galápagos as “boundary objects”—material points of convergence between different spheres of action—that have been encoded with seemingly bottomless layers of meaning over time. First encountered by desperate sailors or pirates in the South Pacific as a live-saving source of food and water, turtles have been transformed by scientists, international mass media, and tourism into conservation icons and the recipients of legal protections. Simultaneously, local fishermen, often demonized by international media, despise the turtles as a metonym of the broader conversation project.

Drawing from extensive fieldwork conducted in the Galápagos working alongside scientists, as well as archival research using a mix of unpublished correspondence and published scientific articles and books, Hennessy weaves together a lively and engaging historical narrative that shines a light on the contradictions inherent in the current discourse of biological conservation. While conservation is often misrepresented as apolitical, Hennessy shows how the movement to establish the islands as nature preserves represented a continuation of imperial power dynamics. The Ecuadorian state had a vested political interest in developing the archipelago, which clashed directly with the interests of American and European scientists who wished to prevent species like the giant tortoises from going extinct. Although the local economy depends on tourism and the conservation industry, living in a nature preserve subjects galapagueños to increased policing and restriction. In fact, many of the leading scientists at the research station openly discuss the very presence of people in the Galápagos as a nuisance.

*Galápagos Giant Tortoises at the Charles Darwin Research Station, Isla Santa Cruz, the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador. Source: Elias Rovielo*

In this way, Hennessy’s work inserts itself into well-established historiographical conversations about colonial conservation initiatives in environmental history. Others works along similar lines include Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism or Ramachandra Guha’s The Unquiet Wood. At the same time, the book is also well-grounded in methodologies from the history of science. This shows through particularly well in Hennessy’s fieldwork with the scientists and fishermen of the Galápagos. Bringing these two fields into conversation, combined with interventions drawn from political ecology and animal history, she destabilizes hegemonic assumptions about the difference between “nature” and “culture,” which have informed the development of the conservationist discourse. Though she acknowledges that the consciousness of the tortoise lies beyond human comprehension and biologists know very little about their sensory or cognitive faculties, she nonetheless effectively shows their ability to transform local landscapes and vegetation patterns. More significantly, she demonstrates their semiotic function as a multifaceted “object” deeply embedded in political and cultural discourse. Rather than a tortoise-eye view of history, this remains a history centered on human interactions with and perceptions of tortoises.

A well-written and engaging book on a topic that many students will have at least some cultural knowledge (and likely many misconceptions) about, On the Backs of Tortoises would make excellent reading for any class on the history of science, environmental history, or the history of tourism. Due to the accessible style and the captivating narrative, the book will also appeal to many members of the general public, especially anyone who works in or has an interest in biology or conservation. The questions Hennessy raises about the fraught, entangled relationships among scientists, society, and the non-human world, as well as her treatment of the tortoises as historical actors, will surely help drive interesting and productive discussions. This book deserves praise for so effectively presenting the history of a place popularly constructed to lie outside the domain of human affairs to readers in an accessible, coherent way.

________________________________________________________________________________________

How a city plan, the atomic age and Cold War economics converged to shape today’s Austin

Austin’s creation of what today we call its “creative class” was made possible by developments that hived the city into two realities: A pleasant, well-groomed and very White West side, and an out-of-sight, out-of-mind East side for those who would never be in any promotional brochures

By Brooke Shannon

This article first appeared in Urbanitus, a new media project co-founded by Jeremi Suri. The original can be accessed here.

Among famous dates that defined everything that came afterward, there’s 1776 for the Declaration of Independence, 1789 for the French Revolution, 1914 for the assassination that sparked World War I, or 1989 for the collapse of communism. For Austin, that seminal moment is 1928.

Following the character-setting City Plan in that year, Austin continued to develop as the state capital and home of Texas’ flagship university. The culture of the small city, the majority of its budget, and the employees in town were associated with either government or university. Although the economy solidified and the cultural landscape grew, the city government remained the same. The city council maintained its at-large structure, but expanded from four to six councilors plus the mayor in 1969. Austin’s city government, however, was by then already long outpaced by modernism, and many areas of town were underrepresented, if at all. As other cities — even throughout the Deep South — reformed local government to reflect the changing world throughout the Civil Rights movement to make accommodations for historically underrepresented minorities, Austin’s council remained unrepresentative of large swaths of its residents. African Americans and Latinx communities were acknowledged by incorporating a single representative in a “gentlemen’s agreement” made in the 1970s that did little to reform the Progressive Era’s open invitation for business interests and “decent” (read, White) people to dominate the government’s agenda long after civil rights legislation was passed throughout the nation.

Swearing in ceremony for Austin City Council members, 1977. *Source: Austin History Center*

The effects of the Progressive Era-influenced changes to Austin’s government system, which gave us the at-large council and a city manager in charge of much of the city’s executive business, outlasted the Progressive Era itself. The Progressive insistence that local government resemble an apolitical service provider endures in many cities; this is not an Austin-specific phenomenon. Motivation behind “running the city like a business,” as it’s often explained, comes from the fear of political parties dominating service provision and politics in cities, which have the potential to be anti-democratic and to inconvenience big segments of the population. In the 19^th century, when these ideas were fomenting in urban politics, this fear had serious material effects. For example, reformers cut the infectious disease mortality rate by 75 percent between 1900 and 1940 due to the development of water and sewer systems, built by cities with minimal partisan patronage.

Then and now a city well run — and well segregated

Beyond breaking the patronage politics that prevented sensible development of city services, Progressive reformers were concerned with the outsized influence of political parties on city politics as well. Parties are national organizations that have state and local offices. In the 19th century, even the people at the top of the parties, U.S. presidents, used patronage to install friendly local administrators and ensure partisan influence in local operations with post offices. During the Progressive Era, counties where the president’s party led in politics got more post offices than others. It may not sound like a big deal in the era of email and 5G internet, but in the 1800s post offices were a vital institution, the lifeline to the outside world. Reformers sought to change the political system, dependent on patronage. But, their sentiment for good governance did little to provide services to the poor or communities of color themselves. It was still mostly about party influence and corruption of individuals.

Urban problems like segregation and later, gentrification, are not unique to Austin of course, but they have been unusually far from the civic mind of a city priding itself as a model. And despite persistent problems like segregation’s lingering influence, the city has always been efficient and well run by the standards of those in charge. The at-large council and manager system that was created early in the 20^th century really set the stage for Austin’s progressive reputation. At the end of World War II, the city government began to recognize that along with that reputation its potential comparative advantage resided in what was soon to be known as the burgeoning knowledge economy. For this was the era that birthed “The Bomb,” a Cold War moment when science, electronics and defense-related spending captured both the public imagination and the budgets of Washington.

*A “For Whites Only” sign on the entrance to an Austin area building, 1935. Source: Austin History Center*

At the same time the contours of the city’s economic character were being reshaped, notions of social justice were largely frozen in the era of Jim Crow of which Austin was still very much a part. Throughout the Civil Rights and Chicano movements, the city’s formal institutions largely remained unchanged and ultimately in service to its White business community. Aside from a few notable exceptions, such as the city council’s first woman representative Emma Long, the city’s Progressive Era government continued to apply the same aging solutions to rapidly changing and emerging problems.

While the first iteration of progressivism was really about smooth, depoliticized local civics, it did carry in its train the beginnings of the consciousness we now associate with today’s progressive ethos, the Civil Rights Movement of course but also immigrants’ rights, a modicum of attention to the poor, the expansion in Texas and elsewhere of educational opportunity. But Austin was a latecomer. Even its community college was not founded until 1973, decades after the idea of universal access to higher and continuing education spread through the nation. Before the height of its “weird” culture, the city grew for a small group of Austinites. With the exception of a few councilors along the way, the local government’s perspective on booster policies was to get out of the way, and allow for the cooperative innovation to take place.

The enduring if forgotten legacy of a consultant named Wood

Emblematic of the start of this evolution was the plan put forth by Richardson Wood, a New-York based planner hired by the city’s chamber of commerce in 1948 to consult on economic development. His recommendations would lay the foundation for Austin’s full embodiment of its character, and for the lasting effects of Progressive Era segregation in gentrification.

It was an era of city development characterized by specialization. Around Texas, other cities took varied routes to specialization: petrochemicals in Houston, military in San Antonio, and banking and commerce in Dallas. In City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas, author Andrew Busch detailed Wood’s plan that depended on skilled personnel in the knowledge economy. Under the direction of Wood, Austin continued growing into its identity as a small university town and state capital.

The University of Texas’ Main Building and the Tower as seen looking north from the South Mall, circa 1930-1940. Source: Austin History Center

As a proto-“creative class” argument in the language we might use today, Wood suggested the advantage the city should consider was its human resources — and its potential to enhance those resources through development that further hived the city into two distinct realities: A pleasant, well-groomed and White West side and an out of sight, out of mind East side for those who would not be in any promotional brochures. Throughout this time, the city council adhered to Wood’s suggestion to capitalize on its existing comparative and competitive advantages: its people and engineered natural beauty.

“Wood wisely foresaw the university as the primary locus of economic potential, both because of its ability to facilitate business and as a producer of the increasingly sought-after commodity, human capital,” wrote Busch. And Wood was right. Busch connects the need for research and development spurred by the Cold War to the incentives and funding given to universities by federal and state governments around the country. Financial incentives for cities like Austin to increase funding for research in its academic centers united the three levels of government in coordination. Wood’s plan, readily embraced by the city council, fit seamlessly with the goals of Austin’s progressive reform-minded government.

Critics have long argued whether the negative impacts of many Progressive Era policies for racial minorities were intentional. Whether it favored majoritarian policies for the sake of democracy or White supremacy, at-large became notorious for forcibly keeping Black and Latinx people out of political decision-making. Austin may be “weird,” but it is also a southern city with a legacy of racial oppression and segregation. After the 1928 charter enshrined segregation, Interstate 35 locked it in place three decades later, splitting the city in half to create today’s racialized border, with Austinites of color to the East, Whites to the West.

*1935 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation map of Austin, Texas, with redline demarcations. Source: The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection*

The decades following the enthusiastic reception of Wood’s plan by Austin’s city leaders were marked by civil unrest around the country. As a southern city, Austin was deeply segregated through its laws and norms, organized in its infamous City Plan of 1928. The “race segregation problem” addressed in the plan was unchanged by the Civil Rights Movement, although there were active movements for racial justice and civil rights.

Students from the city’s universities participated in protests against the segregation of lunch counters. African American leaders appealed to government leaders to desegregate public facilities and make the city more equitable for its communities of color.

Separate and unequal even in the Austin of 2020

Largely, as in its government systems, the city followed national trends and desegregation court decisions. In 1954, the year of the first of the landmark Supreme Court decisions in Brown vs. Board of Education, the local NAACP chapter created a petition for the immediate abolition of segregation in public schools. Then, in 1955, the University of Texas Board of Regents voted unanimously to admit African American undergraduate students, and the Austin School Board desegregated high schools. The first Black students to integrate the city’s school would enter Stephen F. Austin, William B. Travis, and McCallum High Schools in 1956. These “firsts” were all met with counter-mobilization from Whites who were committed to uphold the myth of White supremacy, and the city wasn’t forced to comply fully until the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Of course, even this wasn’t the end. Protests against integration and busing continued through the 1970s until the policy was ended in 1987, and the city was continuously sued for its very slow “deliberate speed” in desegregating public spaces and schools. As for school desegregation today, schools here continue to be the most segregated in the entire state of Texas.

Students boycott the closing of L.C. Anderson High School. A federal judge ordered the closing in 1971 as part of desegregation. In 1973, a new, integrated L.C. Anderson High School reopened at a different location. Source: Austin History Center

The divisions between Austin’s government and its communities of color were well illustrated in the infamous Aqua Fest boat races, held on the shores of Lady Bird Lake in the early 1960s. The event was popular with the larger population, drawing a crowd of 150,000 at its height in 1968. The Mexican American community, led by the Brown Beret community organization (A Chicano group inspired by Chicago’s Black Panthers), pushed back against the problems brought from the festival. Traffic congestion, noise, and safety concerns were raised by Chicanos, all going unheeded by the organizers and city leaders.

Joseph Martinez, community leader and President of the Guadalupe Community Development Corporation, said of the boat races, “They didn’t care. There was no opportunity East of Interstate 35. It was, ‘whatever we could do to take advantage of and dump on them.’ The high noise levels and so many people coming on to the East side, for what purpose? For money to be made and to be taken out of the community. It was yet another injustice, bad treatment to minorities.”

*Protests, led by Austin’s Chicano community, against the boat races during Aqua Fest, 1970s. Source: Austin History Center*

Poor treatment of communities of color was the consistent downside to the first progressive movement, which Austin continued to embody long after the demise of the movement itself. Events like Aqua Fest were not one-off but cumulative and communities of color demanded among other things, representation on the council. This wasn’t achieved until the 1970s for both the city’s African American and Chicano communities.

The first seeds sown for a true progressivism

Among the seeds of new progressivism in Austin that were planted long before the 21^st century, and long before the first councilors of color were elected, were those sown by Emma Long who became the first (White) woman on council. First elected in 1948, her agenda was progressive by the standards of any era and ultimately endeared her to the city, which later renamed City Park as Emma Long Park in 1987. But in her time Long’s pioneering had many Austinites calling her a communist. As councilor, she sponsored policy to revamp the city’s charter and to integrate the golf course and library.

Re-Election Card for Emma Long, the first woman on Austin City Council.
Note that she is referred to as, “Mrs. Stuart Emma Long.” Source: Austin History Center

At the time, Austin politics reflected the rest of the South; a small number of White businessmen led the council, preferring to run the city like a business. City policies at the time were particularly friendly to business interests and strengthened Austin’s reputation as a booster city. Long, however, sponsored ordinances on public administration and civil rights, including an ordinance to prohibit racial discrimination in housing sales. In a city like Austin, with a history full of racist policies such as redlining to deny mortgages to non-White homebuyers, this was a big deal. Long was a true progressive, not only by virtue of breaking the gender barrier. Her tenure represented a push forward in expanding democracy in many ways.

Between the Progressive Era and when the city’s status was cemented as the “weird” oasis deep in the heart of Texas, the seeds were planted. Through the Richardson Woods plan encouraging the city to emphasize its comparative advantage rather than become a military town or petrochemical center, Austin settled into its identity as a university town with the asset of a knowledge economy. And it was from here that the economy would grow into the familiar cluster of technology companies, the “Silicon Hills,” that define much of Austin today.

It would be decades, however, before the city government was reformed to keep up with the city’s more progressive needs.

The Afterlives of Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France, by Ronen Steinberg (2019)

By Camila Ordorica

The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France. By Ronen Steinberg. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. 240 pp. $19.95.

Between 1793 and 1794, the Jacobin Club, a leftist political organization led by Maximilien Robespierre held political power in France. Via this medium, the Jacobins, as they came to be known, enforced a radical understanding of the revolutionary values of the French Revolution through mass violence. This episode is known simply as “the Terror”. In 1794 the Jacobins were forced out office in an episode called the “Thermidorian Reaction”, after which everything seemed to show what the Terror was a thing of the past. In The Afterlives of Terror. Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France, Ronen Steinberg challenges this assumption and argues that this episode stretched beyond the years of its occurrence in the form of debates and practices aimed towards overcoming this modern form of national trauma.

Did the Terror really pass if public opinion and popular practices were engaged in discussing and overcoming the Terror itself? Informing his argument with contemporary theorization of violence developed mainly by Holocaust studies, Steinberg applies the contemporary categories of “trauma” and “transitional justice” to this episode and analyzes the social practices that aimed to make sense and reconcile violence with the new social life that sprung from it. Examining them through these concepts, he shows how the need to overcome collective trauma was as prevalent then as it is now. Steinberg thus presents the Terror as a historic episode that extended well beyond its material events as it invaded the discursive realms of memory and time. In studying this invasion, he shows how pervasive the recent past continued to be even after the events themselves had passed, making an argument for continuity in historical temporality.

Steinberg’s book engages with this inquiry through five case studies which function as the structural division of the book. Chapter 1 studies the semiotic crisis debated through public opinion on the events of the Revolution. It focuses on the inability of the existent language to refer to the new events and thus introduces the invention of new concepts, such as “terrorism” and “the Terror” itself. Chapter 2 analyzes the trials held as part of the Thermidorian Reaction to public officials who were in charge of enforcing mass violence during the Terror. In order to do so, he applies the concept of “transitional justice,” which sheds light over how revolutionaries dealt with their recent past. Chapter 3 engages with les biens des condamnés, petition records mostly done by women claiming for restitution of property as victims of the Terror, exemplifying what Steinberg sees as a desire to reestablish the past prior to the onset of violence. Chapter 4 studies the mass graves as material remains of the violence and the way in which people, family, and society reconfigured their lost ones and in turn their lives through their exhumations and searching parties. And finally, Chapter 5 analyzes the Phantasmagoria theatrical spectacle as a representation of the ghostly past that haunted the present of revolutionary France. By engaging with these case studies, the readers will both learn of the events of the Terror and the Thermidorian reaction whilst finding themselves surprised to see how much these debates actually mirror ours when facing the repercussions of violence. Since the author frames his historical research using contemporary concepts that present-day societies apply to violent episodes on a mass scale, the discussion on conceptual innovation, official trials, restitution, mass graves, and commemoration, all practices that are currently being performed around the globe, rings closer to home than what the reader may originally expect from this publication.

*Siege and capture of the Tuileries castle in 1792, by Pierre-Gabriel Berthault. Source: George Mason University*

A final note. If the readers were to be convinced by this recommendation and decided to engage with the book, they need not be concerned about what may seem at first sight as an anachronistic application of contemporary concepts to an episode so far away in history. On the contrary, the application of these categories’ sheds light on the malleability of historical time and of historical studies in general. Steinberg’s writing is strong and clear and paints an accurate picture of one of the most contested and studied events of the French Revolution. Overall, The Afterlives of Terror comes across as a highly stimulating read as well as a refreshing contribution both to this historiography of French revolutionary studies and to our present-day anxieties on mass violence and trauma. Readers can be certain that this book will both challenge and expand their knowledge of this episode while also keeping them fully engaged.

Revisiting Into the Wild

In June 2020, controversial monuments began to come down across America. This time, not only were confederate statues on the menu—those of Theodore Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant, Christopher Columbus and even (in Portland, Oregon) George Washington were as well. Tied to larger protests against police brutality and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, it is no surprise that the removal of another monument, near Healy, Alaska went largely unnoticed. For a ragtag assembly of outsdoorsy types, the monument had become an iconic representation of their values. For others, particularly locals, it evoked a worldview they deemed unsustainable and suspect. Removal on June 19 came after an increasing number of injuries and deaths were attributed to its presence.

*Self-portrait of McCandless on the Stampede Trail, found undeveloped in his camera after his death (via Wikipedia)*

The object in question was an abandoned 1946 International Harvester K-5. Originally part of the Fairbanks public transit fleet, it had been hauled 30 miles east of Healy into the Denali National Park during the 1960s where it was used by seasonal hunters as a makeshift cabin. In 1992, Christopher McCandless—an intrepid but inexperienced explorer—had sheltered in the bus for 114 days slowly starving to death. His story was popularized by Jon Krakauer’s 1993 book Into the Wild, which was adapted into a blockbuster movie of the same name in 2007. The ensuing legend has inspired hundreds of travelers to visit the site of McCandless’ demise. For them, the bus became a latter-day lieux de memoire—a term coined by the historian Pierre Nora meaning “site of memory;” a place that both stored and secreted communal remembrance. How did an old bus, and the young person it entombed, end up becoming so iconic and controversial? Into the Wild sheds light on why, and in the process give us insights into the cultural history of America in the 1990s, as well as the historical production of memory in general.

In 1968, Christopher McCandless was born into a middle-class family on the outskirts of Washington D.C. His home-life was both traditional and dysfunctional. Domestic violence and infidelity lurked behind an ostensibly cookie-cutter suburban upbringing. McCandless emerged from adolescence smart and sharp-elbowed, dismissive of bourgeois life and resistant to the prospect of an orthodox career. After graduating from Emory University in 1991, he vanished westward in an old sedan, donating the $24,000 dollars in his bank account to Oxfam. He was found 18 months later in a bus outside of Healy, entombed in a sleeping bag his mother had made for him. His corpse weighed only 66 pounds. At the time, McCandless’ death was little more than local news. Krakauer first covered it as a feature writer for Outside magazine but quickly realized how deep the story might go if he followed through on all his leads.

The result, Into the Wild, is valuable to the historian because it captures a specific snapshot of an American moment–the youthful, cynical and restless counter-culture that emerged in the early 1990s. More importantly perhaps, it offers a case-study of how public memory is produced through literature, journalism, film, monuments and archives—a process Krakauer himself was instrumental in kick-starting. Finally, Into the Wild asks the historian: does history have to be important? Can it simply be belle lettres or elegant storytelling?

Krakauer wrote because he was personally driven to know more about McCandless—his backstory, his skittish journey from Atlanta to Healy, his values and friendships. What drove McCandless across the country (usually hungry and always broke)? Why was he able to strike up so many lasting friendships? Why did he die? Krakauer found traces of his subject all across the West, from the crop-fields of the Dakotas to the hippie communes of the Nevada desert and the soup kitchens of Los Angeles. It turned out that McCandless had hitchhiked, train-hopped, walked (and indeed canoed) thousands of miles across the country. He had taken on the moniker “Alexander Supertramp,” ghosted his family and furnished himself a new one—pieced together from the roughnecks, “rubber tramps” and retirees whom he met along the way.

Into the Wild broadens out from its primary subject to tell the stories of those who McCandless bonded with during his travels. Krakauer introduces us to Wayne Westerberg, a burly grain elevator operator wanted by the FBI for petty fraud. He gave McCandless a harvesting job and encouraged him in his wider endeavors. We meet Jan Burres, who drifts around the West in an old van selling knickknacks at flea markets. She saw something of her own estranged son in McCandless and took him in. We also meet Ron Franz, a widower who found a way out of addiction and depression through religious faith. He became so attached to McCandless that he offered to adopt him. Thanks to Krakauer’s lush yet unpretentious depictions of these people, a portrait of an American counter culture pours off the pages. As with John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946), Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1959) and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1972), Into the Wild is one of the great American works of narrative non-fiction, drilling down deeply into a contemporary moment and taking a core sample that can be preserved and repurposed for future research. In addition, during the process of writing, Krakauer amassed an archive of postcards, letters, photographs, annotated books and mementos that now help to perpetuate a public memory in digital form.

It can be strange to think of the early 1990s as history, and yet much of Into the Wild underlines that this was an age closer to the assassination of John F. Kennedy than the present. McCandless drives a stick shift, sends faxes and uses payphones. His views might be described as “liberal-tarian”—they certainly don’t fit along the current grains of American political culture. His critique of middle-class life appears cliched precisely because such sentiments are now so firmly established in youth culture. And Krakauer himself writes with a blissful ignorance of the modern penchant for psychological lingo. He portrays McCandless as angry, confused, impetuous and troubled—but not depressed, mentally unstable or emotionally traumatized. In doing so, Krakauer never robs McCandless of his agency or responsibilities. What emerges is a now iconic Gen X hedonist—a Kurt Cobain of the wilderness rebelling against the creature comforts of white-flight suburbia, breaking bread with the flotsam and jetsam of American society, finding solace on the frontiers that remain. McCandless isn’t alone in this cultural space: Timothy Treadwell (“Grizzly Man”), Christopher Knight (the “North Pond Hermit”) and the extreme skier Shane McConkey have all been subject to similar degrees of media coverage, pointing to our modern penchant for stories that mingle narcissism, hubris and ‘90s exploration of the frontiers.

*Photo of “Into the Wild” bus created for the film. Unaltered Photo by Jeffrey L. Cohen, via Flickr*

Works like Into the Wild furnish historians with a clear sense of an age that will increasingly come into view as it slides from personal memory into written source. It is also reminder of the importance that journalism plays in historical scholarship. Contemporary reporters are the paramedics of the past—arriving on the scene first, stabilizing subjects as best they can so they can be transported in reasonable shape to the historian’s surgery. From there the long task of interpretation can begin. How many young men have succumbed to the wilderness over the last two centuries of American history? Their stories are forgotten without a Jack London or a John Krakauer. But journalists do not simply record events for posterity—they also shape contemporary perceptions and therefore future memories.

Finally, the recurrent themes of Into The Wild—isolation, exploration, individuality, wilderness, abandonment of the East coast, the unstable mental wellbeing and haunted backstory of the protagonist—all give it a gothic timelessness. Indeed, the persistence of these stories (and their ability to perpetrate their own memorial communities) point to a stubborn undercurrent in American culture: the desire to embrace laudable failures and glorious defeats—concepts that the more whiggish mainstream narratives often relegate to the sidelines. Into the Wild runs through a rich but often hidden seam of Americana. Hence, the bus in Healy, like any monument, represented more than its most infamous inhabitant. It performed cultural work as a proxy for the stories and traumas of others. For those who risked their lives retracing McCandless’ footsteps in Alaska, “it is not Chris’ story they are following, it is their own,” explained his sister, Carine (speaking to the Associated Press earlier this year.) Krakauer not only tells a specific person’s story, he tells it in a way that connects it to a wider Western heritage of tragedy along the frontier.

*Image 1: Into the Wild (2007); Image 2: Still of Emile Hirsch in Into the Wild (2007) – Images Copyright Paramount Vantage (via IMDB)*

In June, as the bus was hoisted into the air by a military helicopter, plans were being made for a permanent museum exhibit. Now in storage, the bus will likely end up in the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. There, “it can honor all of the lives and dreams, as well as the deaths and sorrows associated with the bus, and do so with respect and dignity,” said Corri Feige, commissioner for Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources (also speaking to the Associated Press.) Critics—from Healy locals to media commentators—have argued that McCandless is undeserving of his own legend, that his hapless tramping does not merit beautification. Such claims prompt a series of questions for the historian: is a minor episode of American history of wider importance? Is Christopher McCandless a historical figure of significance? Are the core samples taken by Into the Wild worthy of further study? Or can history simply be beautiful? Does it always have to matter? Christopher McCandless is not especially important in any conventional historical sense. But the story of his story reminds us that public memory is not always an elite production. There is an unmet thirst in American culture for the sort of meaning that can only emanate from the tragic. Today, Into the Wild’s value is not going to be found in the sort of historiographical questions that cultural historians usually notch upon their bedposts. It can be found in the ways in which Krakauer amassed an archive, conducted an oral history project, wrote a book and began a legend. Into the Wild has helped to produce this sense of a shared remembrance because it touches upon the wider tragedy of American history. And like the tombs of unknown soldiers, we read, remember and make pilgrimages to such stories because we can tell our own tragedies through them as well.

IHS Climate in Context: Introducing Planet Texas 2050

By Mary Huber

As part of IHS Climate in Context, Not Even Past is delighted to introduce a new collaboration with Planet Texas 2050. Together we’ll publish a series of posts and articles designed to introduce the Planet Texas 2050 project with a particular focus on how historians and archaeologists are contributing to it.

In Texas, change is inevitable.

Roughly 1,000 people are moving to the state every day, according to U.S. Census Bureau numbers. The large majority are clustering in cities, and that affects housing, transportation, and the way people access education and social services in already dense urban areas. At the same time, because of climate change, the state is growing hotter and dryer, meaning some of these high-density areas will suffer longer and more sustained droughts in the future. Add to that the devastating effects of new and worsening storms, and Texas is on course to face major difficulties. Solving them will be a grand challenge.

*Hurricane Harvey from Space in 2017. Source: NASA*

In 2017, The University of Texas at Austin launched Planet Texas 2050, which brings together researchers from across the 40 Acres — in fields such as archaeology, English, engineering and computer science — to collaborate on projects that will address some of these demographic and climactic changes.

The 10-year research project is part of Bridging Barriers Grand Challenges, a university-wide research initiative to contribute insight to some of our most pressing humanitarian, environmental, and societal crises that will affect the way we live and work in the years to come.

*Two ranchers walk across parched land in Culberson County, Texas, in 2011. Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture*

Planet Texas 2050 was the first of the three grand challenge initiatives. It began when researchers from across UT started crowdsourcing ideas for research questions that would benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. They identified climate change and resilience as one of the most critical challenges facing Texas and launched eight initial research projects in its first year. These looked at everything from how urbanization affects Austin’s watersheds and building a platform to share metropolitan-level data with policy makers and public sector agencies to how storytelling and metaphor affect the way we perceive and treat our surroundings — and how we understand the threat of climate change. From its earliest days, Planet Texas 2050 has been wholly committed to a kind of extreme interdisciplinarity, placing the humanities and arts on equal footing with science and social science.

Left: Planet Texas 2050 sponsored Seyi Odufuye, a UT studio art major, to join a 12-day ClimateForce expedition in the Arctic with environmentalist and explorer Robert Swan. Here she talks with ClimateForce students aboard a ship. *Source: Planet Texas 2050*. *Right: Seyi Odufuye with adventurer Robert Swan, the first person to walk to both the north and south poles.* *Source: Planet Texas* 2050

In its second year, Planet Texas 2050 expanded from eight to 25 projects, as researchers looked at things like better flood modeling in Texas, the extent of transportation-related pollution in cities, and the use of sensors to detect microscopic changes in the environment.

Most recently, Planet Texas 2050 leadership decided to invest in a set of six interrelated “flagships” over a four-year period. These flagship projects will address major issues that have come to light in the first three years of research and will stretch the Planet Texas 2050 research community into new territory, diving into critical research areas such as biodiversity, landscape change, and environmental justice.

*Above the Llano Estacado Region of West Texas. Source: Fredlyfish4*

One flagship team is working closely with community members and nonprofits to create curriculum that will foster interest and skills in a variety of green careers. Another team is using visual and acoustic sensors to look at things like water flows and animal noises in an attempt to better understand the speed and degree of change in places undergoing rapid transformation of natural habitat across Texas. A third team is reimagining the ways policy makers plan for housing, infrastructure, transit and the response to natural disasters in a more equitable manner. Other teams are building predictive models and decision support tools to help communities prepare for climate-related challenges like drought and flooding. Finally, researchers are using archaeology, storytelling, and paleoclimate data to learn lessons from the near and ancient past to improve resilience in the face of climactic changes today.

At the heart of all of the projects is the need for advanced data collection and modeling, which is accomplished using the supercomputing power at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Planet Texas 2050 researchers are using weather, atmospheric, and population data they have collected to model everything from the availability of water in Texas to how to best evacuate hospital patients during hurricanes. This will help local and state agencies and city planners make decisions in the face of climate-related hazards.

Additionally, Planet Texas 2050 researchers are working directly with affected communities to design more thoughtful solutions. Research teams have formed collaborations with residents and local nonprofits to look at climate-related challenges in neighborhoods like Dove Springs in Southeast Austin, listening to residents as they share insight about their problems with things like heat and flooding. Planet Texas 2050 researchers are exploring the relationship between humans and their environment by looking at things such as how climate change will introduce new pathogens resulting in infectious disease.

*Children garden at Pleasant Hill Elementary in South Austin while their parents organize with Go! Austin/Vamos! Austin. Source: GAVA*

Historians and archaeologists are key to the project. Researchers attached to the project have explored the ways humans in the ancient past survived and adapted to droughts and floods, starting at the Greek site of Histria in Romania. Abandoned settlements such as this one bear witness to the changes in sea level, droughts, erosion or flooding that left them unsustainable. Texas’s urban centers are expected to see many of these same challenges as a result of climate change. Researchers are also carrying out scientific analyses of water and watershed management and demographic dynamics in the Maya region around Rome and the Greek and Roman cities of the lower Danube. The interactions of water and soil chemistry, paleoclimate, and landscape management will be used to inform models that predict how Texas communities may look in the future. Genetic, epigenetic, and isotopic analyses of human populations also will allow researchers to reconstruct population dynamics and individual life histories. The lessons learned by Planet Texas 2050 researchers could help to understand how people will respond to similar changes today as from the ancient past while offering practical advice to help society correct course in the 21^st Century.

The Planet Texas 2050 initiative still has five years to go, and researchers will continue to use the state of Texas as a living laboratory to help address problems and opportunities resulting from urbanization and climate change. The discoveries, tools, and recommendations that teams make will be applicable to researchers, organizations, educators, and policy makers across the country and the world.

“The Eyes of Texas are Upon You: Have You Paid That Poll Tax?”

By Rachel Gunter

In the Austin History Center, there is a curious poster that demands the attention of “WOMEN!” in red, all-capital letters. Below this, a pair of eyes peer out beneath furrowed eyebrows warning “The Eyes of Texas are Upon You: Have You Paid That Poll Tax?” At the bottom of the poster is the instantly recognizable façade of the Alamo, just above the name of the group responsible for the ad, Texas League of Women Voters, Georgetown, Texas.

Poster, “Women! The Eyes of Texas are Upon You,” Jane Y. McCallum Papers, via Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

The poster is in the Jane McCallum collection. After Texas ratified the 19^th Amendment in June 1919, the Texas Equal Suffrage Association became the state chapter of the League of Women Voters, and the local suffrage clubs were encouraged to make that transition as well. McCallum was an Austin-area suffragist who went on to spearhead publicity campaigns for the League of Women voters, lead the Women’s Joint Legislative Council, and serve as Texas Secretary of State under two governors. It is likely she had a hand in this particular poster, but we can’t be sure. In fact, there isn’t even a date on the poster, which scholars and archivists have only dated as being from the early 1920s. Both the Texas Equal Suffrage Associations and the League used maternal appeals to get women to pay the poll tax. They argued that this is how Texas funded public schools, and that “90% of Texas educators are women and need a living wage.”[1] The poster is in line with the WWI-era appeals to women to do their duty as citizens.

The “eyes of Texas” phrase was common enough that it isn’t surprising to see it atop a League poster, but the links between suffragists and the University of Texas ran deep too. Texas suffragists had joined with the university’s alumni to work to impeach anti-suffragist Governor James E. Ferguson in 1917. Ferguson had basically defunded the university for refusing to fire several professors whom he viewed as his political opponents. While Texas was a one-party state, the Texas Democratic Party was divided between progressive, reform Democrats and conservative, anti-prohibition Democrats. The reformers won this fight, impeaching and removing Governor Ferguson, and moderate reformer William Hobby assumed the governorship. Ferguson then ran for re-election against Hobby claiming he had resigned, and that therefore the Texas Senate’s judgement barring him from holding office did not apply to him. It was a close race. With several reformers running, they risked splitting the progressive vote and inadvertently handing the election to Ferguson. To ensure victory, Hobby signed the primary woman suffrage law, allowing Texas women (if they citizens and considered legally white) to vote in the primary but not in general elections. Hobby won, and the leverage afforded by primary suffrage is part of why suffragists were able to get Texas to ratify the 19^th Amendment hardly a month after the state suffrage amendment was defeated at referendum. After such a coordinated effort to remove the anti-suffrage governor, using UT’s fight song and Texan imagery like the Alamo made sense to women reformers in Texas.

Minnie Fisher Cunningham sits beside Governor Hobby as he signs a resolution for full woman suffrage, February 5, 1919. [PICA-11670], via Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

While the poster isn’t explicitly racist, the poll tax itself was. The poll tax and the all-white primary were the state’s only Jim Crow election laws. Both were passed at the turn of the century, and together they nearly eliminated Black voting in the state and severely reduced poor white voting.

The poster encourages women to pay their poll tax, but the deadline was crucial as well. Poll taxes had to be paid by February 1^st each year. Paying the poll tax after that deadline resulted in disfranchisement for the year. Servicemen returning home from WWI in 1919 after the poll tax deadline found themselves effectively disfranchised for up to a year. Suffragists lobbied the state legislature encouraging them to pass a law that would enfranchise newly returned WWI veterans in 1919, and they were successful in getting a law that temporarily allowed veterans to vote on their discharge papers instead of poll tax receipts. [Texas also completely barred servicemen from voting for the length of their service, but that is another story].

The legislature updated both the poll tax and white primary laws shortly after the 19^th Amendment became part of the Constitution. Six weeks before the 1920 presidential election, Governor Hobby called the legislature into special session and warned them of the dangers of a “wide open election.”[2] He informed them the 19^th Amendment invalidated the state poll tax, which as written only applied to men. The legislature rewrote the poll tax to ensure its constitutionality just a few weeks before the presidential election.

Poll tax receipt for the year 1919, K.K. Legett Collection at the Hardin-Simmons University Library via The Portal to Texas History.

Additionally, the direct primary law left enforcement of the white primary to the Democratic Party, which the state charged with setting its own membership criteria. This was not strict enough for many white legislators who watched in fear as some Black women managed to vote in 1920 and thereafter. The state legislated the all-white primary itself in 1923. In doing so, they overstepped their bounds and created the white primary’s Achille’s heel, which the Supreme Court would eventually use to strike it down entirely in Smith v. Allwright (1944). It is not a coincidence that the state acted to shore up their only two Jim Crow voting restrictions after woman suffrage was enacted by the 19^th Amendment.

Finally, we know that at its earliest the poster was made in 1920 and more likely 1921 or later. If it is from 1921, one of the amendments on the ballot would have disfranchised (mostly Mexican and German) immigrant voters, while allowing spouses to pay each other’s poll taxes, essentially making it easier for white, middle-class women to vote. Nearly two-thirds of the country allowed immigrants who had declared their intention to become citizens to vote at some point in their territorial or state history. In much of the south, declarant immigrant voting was a Reconstruction reform intended to counter the vote of unreconstructed white southerners. In 1919, a similar state constitutional amendment that would have enacted woman suffrage but eliminated declarant immigrant voting in Texas failed at referendum. In 1921, once white women could vote, the immigrant disfranchising amendment passed.

[1] September 30, 1919, TESA to County Chairmen, [newsletter], Box 5, Folder 12, Jane Y. McCallum Collection, Austin History Center.

[2] State of Texas, 36^th Legislature, Journal of the House of Representatives, 4^th called sess., 1920, 5.

« Previous Page